Prokofiev-Romeo and Juliet. He manages to be both old and young simultaneously - ages ago. Prokofiev that is. Valery Gergiev, brute, actuates, reaches and manages strength and childish enthusiasm via the LSO. (Romeo and Juliet, No 13 Dance of the Knights).
posted by vapidave
on Nov 6, 2016 -
18 comments

All of Bach: Every week, you will find a new recording here of one Johann Sebastian Bach’s 1080 works, performed by The Netherlands Bach Society and many guest musicians.
posted by Cash4Lead
on May 5, 2014 -
12 comments

In An Autumn Garden "I always want to write erotic music... Not only about the love between men and women, but in a much more universal sense - about the sensuality of the mechanism of the universe... about life."
Toru Takemitsu
Part 1Part 2>
I close my eyes for this (you don't have to).
posted by lucerita
on Jan 19, 2014 -
3 comments

The music of ancient Greece, unheard for thousands of years, is being brought back to life by Armand D'Angour, a musician and tutor in classics at Oxford University. He describes what his research is discovering.

Caroline Shaw is a 30 year old composer, violinist, and singer. Yesterday, she also became the youngest person ever, and one of the few women, to receive the Pulitzer Prize for music for her composition Partita for 8 Voices. The work features four baroque inspired movements that were influenced by the violin music of Bach, and yet despite the baroque title, Partita is still thoroughly modern. The Pulitzer jury described it as a "highly polished and inventive a cappella work uniquely embracing speech, whispers, sighs, murmurs, wordless melodies and novel vocal effects." [more inside]
posted by fremen
on Apr 16, 2013 -
45 comments

"Note that Scriabin did not, for his theory, recognize a difference between a major and a minor tonality of the same name (for example: c-minor and C-Major). Indeed, influenced also by the doctrines of theosophy, he developed his system of synesthesia toward what would have been a pioneering multimedia performance: his unrealized magnum opus Mysterium was to have been a grand week-long performance including music, scent, dance, and light in the foothills of the Himalayas Mountains that was somehow to bring about the dissolution of the world in bliss." - From Russian composer Alexander Scriabin's Wikipedia page [more inside]
posted by Rustic Etruscan
on Mar 25, 2013 -
12 comments

Giovanni Sollima is a contemporary composer and cellist whose music is at once fiercely modern and lushly romantic. Witness Daydream: the first half is a rich, warm trio, and the second half is a virtuosic cello solo that is, for lack of better words, punk as fuck. His longer composition Violoncelles, Vibrez! is a lush, pulsating piece that builds to an incredible climax. My favorite work of his, L. B. Files, is afour-partwork that rapidly shifts styles and colors and textures – simply glorious all around.
posted by Rory Marinich
on Mar 6, 2013 -
24 comments

To say thatMessiaen's Vingt Regards sur L'Enfant-Jesus(Twenty Contemplations on the Infant Jesus) is a masterpiece is a gross understatement. Over sixty years after its composition, it has rightfully earned the recognition of being one of the most important piano works of the 20th century. ... [It] is one of the most personal and intimate pieces Messiaen ever wrote, and it gives the listener a close look at Messiaen the person. Messiaen was a deeply religious person, and although his faith influenced every single piece he wrote, the Vingt Regards is almost like his own personal spiritual diary. - Keith Kerchoff[more inside]
posted by Egg Shen
on Dec 13, 2012 -
16 comments

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